He's registering it now - we have a Consular at long last! Huzzah! Now to drift off into a codeine induced coma - sucks I have to be sick the weekend BEFORE the next beta test. I'll try to guilt trip Mike (Suspiria) into playing. He's on a Sith bent anyway and he wants to chain lightening the fuck out of people. Will let you know.

I like the environments I'm seeing so far. Not so sure about the character faces- I think they're pretty damn ugly, honestly (Though I can't recall that many games where Bioware haven't made faces ugly as hell). They honestly look a bit like the Dragon Age anorexic faces without the shadows to accentuate that fact. Thankfully being an alien will probably alleviate that to some degree.

Been to any large, open areas yet? Interested in knowing the drawing distance in places like that.

So do the storyline and leveling go hand-in-hand here? Have there been any reports of needing to halt the storyline and going off to grind or get better weapons and armor?

The draw distance is very, very far for the basic environment. However, there is a certain distance where trees start to pop in, which I would have preferred to be a little farther. That goes for various objects and players as well. Don't know what the new build is like though, and the one I played didn't have anti-aliasing.

Storyline and leveling up so far has been hand-in-hand. If you do all the quests in each area, you definitely won't need to grind.

I actually got an email regarding this, this morning. Doing install now; actually rather hyped about this game after watching AngryJoe's gameplay/first impressions. Depending on how it rubs me after a first hand test run I might actually pick this up as the first MMO I've played "seriously" since WoW.